Playing the Rape Card: ‘Media Psychiatrist’ Ratchets Up Anti-Videogame Rhetoric

Do violent videogames, including upcoming title Bulletstorm, cause an increase in rape? Pop psychiatrist Carole Lieberman says they do, but fails to cite a single supporting study. Image courtesy Epic Games

Pundits and legislators have been attacking the gaming industry for decades now, pinning the blame for tragic events like the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech on violent videogames. This week, self-described “media psychiatrist” Carole Lieberman took that war of words one step further, claiming explicit games trigger rapes.

“The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in videogames,” Lieberman told Fox News in an article, sensationally headlined “Is Bulletstorm the Worst Videogame in the World?” The story discusses the violence and sexual innuendo in developer Epic Games’ upcoming first-person shooter.

Though extremists like Jack Thompson have attacked violent videogames on multiple fronts in the past, this is the first time we’ve heard anyone link gaming to sexual aggression. By playing the rape card, Lieberman ratcheted up the rhetoric in the crusade against violent videogames — and whipped up fury among gamers, who attacked her remarks in online forums (and even bombed her books with negative reviews on Amazon.com).

Despite the seriousness of Lieberman’s allegations, when Wired.com asked her multiple times to clarify her comments, she failed to cite a single study, statistic or piece of evidence that proved her point.

Perhaps it’s because such studies simply don’t exist.

“I don’t know where [Lieberman] would get any evidence for this opinion,” said Iowa State University professor Douglas A. Gentile, who studies the relationship between media and violence. “There’s really very little to substantiate her claims in research literature.”

Gentile has been researching violence in media since 1999. He has written books and studies about the psychological effects of videogames. When asked by Wired.com in a phone interview, he said very few mainstream games contain any real sexual content. Explicit old games like Leisure Suit Larry and Custer’s Revenge, Gentile pointed out, are hard to find on store shelves nowadays.

In a phone interview with Wired.com, Lieberman claimed “countless studies” show a connection between videogames and violence. Yet she would not name any of those studies and could not name a single relevant videogame, though she did reference “that game where … it took place in an academy.” (We think she was talking about Bully, Rockstar Games’ controversial satire about a “troublesome schoolboy.”)

“There are thousands of studies,” Lieberman said. “I’d have to look through them or recent ones as far as finding one that specifically speaks about rape, and I don’t have the time to do that right now.”

“There are no studies [linking videogames to rape] that I know of,” Gentile said.

Lieberman would not elaborate or cite other cases. In fact, Wired.com could not find any research linking videogames to sexual aggression or rape. And though we attempted to contact the authors of many psychological texts involving violent media, Gentile was the only one to respond by press time.

Faulty Logic

Bulletstorm is indeed a violent videogame — the Mature-rated shooter, which comes out Feb. 22 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, rewards players based on the creativity of their kills. The game also uses sexual innuendo to glorify violence — for example, a flail explosion on multiple enemies rewards you with a trick-shot accolade called a Gang Bang. However, the game contains no sexual scenes.

“No serious researcher is linking playing violent videogames with criminal violence,” Gentile said. “There is good evidence that playing violent videogames will lead to increases in aggressive behavior, and violence is a very extreme subtype of physical aggression … but there is almost no evidence that playing a violent videogame has a clear causal link to that level of serious criminal violence.”

Some researchers also take issue with the way violent videogame studies are handled. Jeffrey Goldstein, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, questions their validity in the book Handbook of Computer Game Studies, co-authored by Joost Raessens.

“All the studies that have examined the effects of videogames on aggression have only involved measures of possible short-term aggressive consequences,” Goldstein and Raessens wrote. “The majority of the studies on very young children … tend to show that children do become more aggressive after either playing or watching a violent videogame but all these studies were based on the observation of a child’s free play after playing a violent videogame [emphasis original]. There is much speculation as to whether the procedures to measure aggression levels [are] methodologically valid and reliable.”

When shown these figures, Lieberman said the “statistics do not reflect all the rapes, since many go unreported and others relate to child abductions.” When asked for statistics showing an increase of rape in recent years, Lieberman said she did not have time to pull them up.

“Obviously I know what I’m talking about or I wouldn’t be called upon to testify in front of Congress,” she said. “I’ve been doing this research for over 20 years…. It’s all about violence, it all applies to rape. And it has been done on videogames less violent or less sexual than the current one that we’re talking about.”

On Friday, several days after our initial phone interview, Wired.com asked Lieberman once again if she had found time to dig up a specific study linking videogames to rape. She once again referenced the “Violent Video Game Effects” study and failed to name specific games with sexual content that might encourage rape.

“Over the years, I have read hundreds of studies linking videogames to violence. Rape, as a violent act, is implied in them,” she wrote in an e-mail. “When videogames are violent and sexual, it causes the players to become desensitized to rape and think it is a ‘game.'”

We’re hoping she’ll locate and forward more of the “countless studies” that allegedly link games to rape, once the firestorm started by her comments subsides.